Here I Go Again: A Novel

by Jen Lancaster

  I desperately dig into my purse, hoping to come up with an adequate offering. My fingers close around a thin, square object and I yank it out of the bag and thrust it toward her.

  Amy quizzically examines the object. “You brought me a signed Motherfrucker CD? Thank you?”

  “My pleasure,” I say, pushing past her into the cramped, dark living room. Her furniture is all secondhand-store stuff, and not in the cute, vintage way. A rickety table ringed with coffee cup stains is surrounded by mismatched chairs. The dining nook abuts the microscopic galley kitchen on the other side of the room. The floor’s made of sad, stained linoleum, accented by a threadbare rug. I know teachers don’t make a ton of money, but come on! This isn’t shabby-chic; it’s just shabby.

  With a tiny bit of trepidation, I plant myself on her oddly fussy, harvest gold mushroom-and-hummingbird-print sofa. The springs are shot and my butt sinks down past my knees. This couch is like trying to sit in a teacup, or a toilet seat with the lid up.

  “Amy, can we talk?”

  “No, please, I insist,” she says all deadpan from her spot by the door. “Come in. Make yourself at home. May I fix you some breakfast, perhaps?”

  I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic or not. “You’re sweet to offer but I had Burger King’s French toast sticks in the car. Have you tried them? They’re genius! They come with a cup of syrup for dipping! Plus, the hash browns? They’re little round Tater Tot coins and they are phenomenal. I’m talking the perfect hangover food.” Then I take in the rest of the scene, noticing all the empty wine bottles in the overflowing kitchen garbage. “Perhaps you’ve already discovered that?”

  “Why are you here and how can I convince you to leave?”

  I’m here on a mission from the future, sort of, but not really. But I can’t say that, because it sounds cray-cray. Instead, I respond, “How’ve you been?”

  Resigned to the fact that I’ve planted myself, Amy folds herself into the recliner across from the couch. “How the fuck does it look like I’ve been?”

  “Wait, that came out wrong. Let me try again. How have you been?”

  Amy crosses her arms tightly in front of her. “Doesn’t matter if you emphasize different syllables; it’s the same goddamned question.”

  Okay, think, self, think. You’re here to get answers. You need to find out what went wrong. And she’s not going to answer you if there’s nothing in it for her. What can you offer her? How can you help?

  “Do you want some money? I’m kind of rich.” Amy eyes me suspiciously, so I scramble to make my offer sound less tawdry and obnoxious. “I mean, for your legal defense. I’m sure you’re innocent and stuff and I totally want to help you. I figure on a teacher’s salary, you’re not . . . flush. And we’re the LT Lions and we need to stick together. We roar as one! Lion pride!”

  Amy continues to glower at me, so I keep pitching. I always say the most successful publicists never shut up when they’re in a pinch. As long as words are coming out of your mouth, you’re still in the game. “See, my friend Nicole—remember Nicole Golden; she was a cheerleader with me?—Nicole and I are trying to put together a twenty-year reunion for next month and we’re pretty busy, so we thought maybe we could hire you to assist us, what with you on administrative leave and all. I mean, yeah, you have to prove your innocence at some point, but maybe by me paying you to work on the reunion, you’ll be able to do so.”

  Amy responds with a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup. “Innocent. Yeah. That’s what I am.”

  I’m having a lot of trouble equating this wretch with the apple-cheeked nerdy girl from the front row of my classes who raised her hand for every question, and with the poised, polished woman who’d have scalped me given the chance. I liked it better when she hated me, because this is kind of heartbreaking. “All a big mistake, right? You’d never endanger the life of a student. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Amy pushes her hair off either side of her face. “Really doesn’t, does it? Yet here we are.”

  Then she starts to cry. Big, fat tears roll down her face. She doesn’t try to stop them or blot with a Kleenex. She just lets them flow.

  I really, really did not think this through.

  I give her a conciliatory pat on the knee, because I’m not sure what else to do. “What happened?” With the decathlete kids, with college, with Oprah, with everything. “Last I knew, you were winning science scholarships and planning to go to Michigan State. How did you get here?” I gesture around the room and then, as if on cue, her high school graduation picture falls off the wall.

  “University of Michigan.”

  “Huh?”

  “It was U of M. I was supposed to attend U of M.”

  “They aren’t the same place?”

  “No.”

  “Really? I always thought they were the same, because the University of Michigan is in the state of Michigan. You can see why that’d throw someone off. I bet it’s a common mistake. Maybe one of them should call themselves a college and the other could say they’re a university to cut down on the confusion factor and—”

  Amy cocks her head. “Are you here to debate the differences in the Michigan higher-education system?”

  “Oh, sorry. Go on.” I pat her knee again.

  “I won the Sanderson Sciences Grant, and that was going to pay for U of M. I guess you hadn’t heard my grant was later taken away.”

  “How come? That’s so wrong! You were such a smarty!”

  “Do you remember homecoming night?”

  I nod solemnly. “Like it was only last month.”

  “Then you remember that awful Tammy and her cheer. What a fucking bitch. My friends took me to the bathroom to calm me down and by the time we were finished in there, the game was over and we’d won.”

  I inadvertently shout, “Lion pride!” What can I say? Terrible habit. But Amy doesn’t even seem to notice the interruption. She’s all far away in thought.

  “Some kids were celebrating in the parking lot and they asked us to join them. We figured we shouldn’t be out there with open containers, so we went back to their house—one of the kids’ parents were out of town. That’s when I had my first drink. My friends weren’t into it, but the first sip of beer was like coming home. I can’t describe how amazing it made me feel, how different, how relaxed. I was so tightly wound in high school, but with liquor, I felt like a whole new me. That night changed everything. A real beginning of the end.”

  No. No, no.

  Please don’t say that the unexpected win at homecoming changed your trajectory. I cannot be responsible for this. I mean, I was helping her!

  Or, at the very least, righting karmic wrongs.

  “A lot of us drank in high school,” I offer.

  Amy picks at the pilled fabric on her robe. “Most of you didn’t have a history of alcoholism in your family. Most of you weren’t predisposed to becoming addicted, but my grandfathers on both sides of the family were drunks. Anyway, after that, I started drinking pretty regularly. My grades slipped and I lost my grant. Suddenly U of M didn’t want me. The worse I did in my classes, the more doors closed for me. No college let me in except for UCI. The bitch of it is, I saw it all happening and I felt powerless to stop myself. Almost like being miserable was somehow my destiny.”

  Please stop saying the D-word. This isn’t destiny; this is bad choices, right?

  “College was a decent time for me—it was easier to manage my schedule around my drinking, and I tried hard in my classes. Well, maybe not as hard as I could have, in retrospect. I was premed for a while, but I was booted from the science department. At UCI. Sloth pride!” she spits.

  I’m not sure what to say, so I just stay quiet. “I wanted to be a plastic surgeon; did you know that, Lissy? I dreamed of being able to travel to the third world and fix kids with deformities in my off-time. What a pathetic joke that is now. Instead I decided to teach science. That way I’d still have some involvement with what’d been
my passion, at least in a cursory way.”

  Amy stands and begins to pace. She unties her robe and then wraps it more tightly around her narrow waist before retying it. (This would probably not be the right moment to compliment her for keeping her high school figure.)

  “My parents were, oh, God, so unhappy. They didn’t understand why I wasn’t living up to my potential. To motivate me, they said they’d pay to get my nose fixed if I could just pull it together.” She gingerly touches her proboscis. “Obviously that didn’t happen.”

  “Then what? How’d you end up here?”

  “North Elgin was the only district that would take me, and that’s only because my uncle was on the school board and his was the deciding vote on a bond issue.”

  “But as a teacher—you must have liked parts of your job, right? I mean, you signed up to be an adviser for the mathletes, right?”

  “I enjoy teaching more than I thought I would. But I’ll be honest: I’ve struggled with my drinking every day, and once I’ve had my first cocktail, rational decisions fly out the door. Believing I’m fine to drive, for example. My first DUI was thrown out of court on a technicality, and my uncle was able to keep the whole thing on the down-low with the board. Not so lucky the second time. After that incident I went to rehab in lieu of being fired.”

  “Where’s your family been in all of this?” I think back to the nice lady who gave up Jazzercise in order to afford her daughter’s rhinoplasty and I hope that they’re supportive. I can’t imagine what it would be like not to have the galvanizing force of Mamma behind me.

  Amy exhales long and hard before answering. “My family totally disowned me after that. They said it was too hard watching me systematically deconstruct my life after what they lived through as kids. They started going to Al-Anon and the group encouraged them to try tough love. Anyway, I’m not getting a third chance from anyone. I don’t deserve it either. I did what the news said I did. I endangered those kids. I thought, ‘Oh, just one little sip to get me through the competition.’ I guess I had more than one. I always do. The kids’ parents are out for my blood—rightfully so. You should read the letters to the editor about me.” Amy falls back into her recliner and hugs her knees to her chest.

  “Are you going into treatment?” I’ve heard about the concept of bottoming out and it seems to me that if she’s not there, she’s close.

  Amy wipes her eyes with the cuff of her robe. “The ironic thing is, I want to go to rehab. I feel like I’m ready to check into a facility, finally. This is rock bottom, and I’m so thankful none of those kids was hurt. Thing is, my insurance has been suspended while I’m on leave. I can’t pay for it myself. I want to get sober, and doing it alone won’t work. I’m so, so screwed.”

  I’m not sure what else to do, so I hug her.

  Then I write her a check.

  Yet I have a feeling that no matter how many zeroes I add, it won’t be enough.

  * * *

  I begin the drive home in silence. No amount of glam rock is going to soothe my soul, so I embrace the quiet.

  I’m having a hard time trying to differentiate between Amy’s poor choices and my culpability. Did altering my own personal timeline create this situation?

  What if everything about the past was exactly the same except that one of the Lions ran a couple of extra yards for a TD at homecoming that night—would Amy have still headed down the path to alcoholism, whether or not I’d been nice to her? It’s certainly not my fault that she has a family history. Much as I like to consider myself the center of the universe, a part of me knows that’s not the case. Possibly I was the domino that started them all falling, but I wasn’t the one who arranged the chips in such a manner.

  When Deva explained the butterfly effect to me, she said the theory is that the air displaced from the flapping of one pretty bug’s wings could start a chain reaction that eventually resulted in a tsunami across the globe. But the question that plagues me is this: Is the butterfly at fault for simply trying to propel itself from one flower to another? Were the butterfly to be aware that by flying, it’s setting up an apocalyptic chain reaction, is it obligated not to move around and take sustenance? Is the butterfly compelled to sacrifice itself for the greater good? And even if the butterfly does cause a cataclysmic event, what if the aftereffects are just as important?

  I mean, look at the Great Chicago Fire that burned down the whole town in 1871. Hundreds of people died and three square miles of the city were destroyed. But if the city hadn’t burned then it wouldn’t have been rebuilt at a time when civic planning had become a reality. The fire stripped the city down to nothing, and when it was rebuilt, it was on a solid foundation for the first time. The slate was wiped clean—not without a cost, of course—but that enabled Chicago to start over and rebuild so much stronger than would ever have been possible on a shaky foundation.

  Drive down any street in Chicago today and you’ll see very few of the “urban canyons” that make New York seem so dark and forbidding and patently impossible to find an address in if you don’t know the cross streets. Chicago’s simple to navigate because it’s laid out on a grid. (New Yorkers will argue their city’s on a grid, too, yet their streets don’t perfectly coincide with latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates; ergo Chicago wins the arbitrary travel-ease contest I set up in my head.)

  Point is, the city was built with a service level down beneath, so the streets are never choked with delivery trucks and mounds of garbage. The city functions now like it never could have had it not been granted a massive do-over. I have to wonder, would Chicago be capable of its present level of commerce and industry had it not suffered such a tragedy? I bet not.

  I’m lost in thought when my phone rings. Anxious to get out of my head for a few minutes, I click the Bluetooth to connect, but before I can even say hello, my mother begins squawking.

  “That man is crazy, hear me? He’s lost his damn mind!”

  I should probably be more concerned here, on the rare chance that my father actually has gone off the reservation. But every time Daddy makes a decision that Mamma doesn’t care for, she attacks his state of mental health. Opting against an inground sprinkler system? Insane! Deciding to take a staycation rather than bring Mamma to Montreal? Cuckoo! Choosing to drive his old wheels for one more year instead of upgrading? Unhinged!

  “What’s he done, Mamma?” I ask, trying to sound more patient than I feel. I mean, I just spent the morning with someone having an actual crisis. I normally indulge my mother, but I’m really not in the mood for it right now.

  “That sonovabitch says he’s going to retire!” The whole car reverberates from the sounds of her shrieking.

  This? This is her crisis? Oh, I am so not entertaining this. “He’s sixty-five, Mamma, and he’s been working eighty-hour weeks since I was born. I’d say it’s time for him to take a break if he wants.”

  You would not believe a woman of her age and social status could be capable of the string of profanity that happens next.

  (You would be wrong.)

  I do my best to put a positive spin on the situation. “Mamma, Mamma. Mamma! Calm down! The world’s not coming to an end. Isn’t there something appealing about the idea of Daddy being home all the time? You can go to lunch whenever you want or take off for the weekend with no notice. You’ll be able to spend so much time at the club! This might be really wonderful for both of you!”

  She’s still fuming. “That is the whole problem! He doesn’t wanna retire so he can be retired! He wants to retire so he can write a book! The man reads three John goddamn Grisham novels and fancies his damn self an author!”

  Actually . . . that’s not the worst idea I ever heard. My dad’s been retreating to his library for years, so I can hardly picture him not standing in front of well-stocked shelves filled with everything from classics to Clancy. Daddy once told me that he’d read every single thing in there. Plus, the bulk of his time as a patent attorney is spent writing and researching, so it makes s
ense that he might gravitate to being an author.

  As persuasively as I can, I tell her, “Mamma, a lot of authors were lawyers first, like Scott Turow and John Grisham. What about Emily Giffin? You like her books and she was a lawyer first. So was the girl who wrote Legally Blonde. This isn’t without precedent and it might be very satisfying for him.”

  Oh. So. Much. Swearing.

  “Mamma, I’m so sorry, but work’s on the other line. Why don’t you e-mail me and tell me how much Daddy sucks, okay?” I mercifully disconnect and click the other line. “Lissy, I mean Melissa speaking.”

  “Liss, hey! It’s Nicole.”

  “Hey, rock star, how are you feeling today?”

  “Physically, so-so.”

  “Next time, try a Burger King breakfast. All that fat and grease and sugar set me straight right away.”

  Nicole giggles. “We’re really not seventeen anymore, are we?”

  “That’s the truth.” Nicole sounds upbeat, but I’m concerned it might just be how she talks when she’s in the office. She’s the kind of girl who, no matter what’s going sideways personally, will always have a kind word and a big smile when you run into her in the hallway. “How are you doing, like, emotionally?”

  I’m relieved to hear her say, “A lot better, so thank you. You were right: A project was just what I needed. That’s why I’m calling—the response to the reunion has been overwhelming! More than a hundred people have already RSVP’d yes! When you get a minute, check out the Facebook page—I sent you a link. You’ll never believe where some of our classmates are now. I can’t even tell you; you’ll have to see it for yourself.”

  Having just seen for myself where one of our classmates is now, I’m not quite as fired up as she is.

  “Woo! Lion pride!” Nicole cheers.

  Wryly, I repeat, “Lion pride.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  What Goes Up